Asylum - 13 Tales of Terror by Matt Drabble Read Free Book Online Page A

threw him over the edge. He is a guy obsessed with routines and schedules; you’ll often see him pacing around the grounds cataloguing anything that he can find.”
    “What about his story? What about the people involved?”
    “Oh they found them alright. They found the double car accident and the cabin burned to the ground. One man’s body inside the cabin with a gunshot wound and three outside; one woman, naked, also with a gunshot wound and two men who had apparently been mauled by some wild animal.”
    “You’re not telling me that it’s true,” Martin laughed incredulously.
    “All I can say is this; there were three bodies outside the cabin, and only two looked like they had been attacked by some kind of wild animal.”
    Martin pondered the tale that he had just been told; it was one thing to fantasies about hearing these tales and compiling them into a book. But it was quite another to listen to a possibly deranged mental patient speaking so articulately as he spun his tale so convincingly.
    He looked down at his notebook his scribbled shorthand had already filled many pages between the background beginnings of the building itself, and Julian’s strange tale. His back nagged at him, sticking in a painful reminder of his injuries and his unsuitability for manual labor such as this. He looked over at Jimmy; the elderly janitor was stooped and twisted with age and his job. His finger joints were swollen with the unmistakable signs of arthritis on the march. His tired face was creased and lined with endless nights pushing a sloppy mop along these very corridors.
    Martin caught a flash of his own reflection in a clean and gleaming window; was this to be his future? His own pristine new uniform faded before his eyes, the blue becoming paler over time and continuous wash cycles. His features became tired and wrinkled; his hair grew white and thin. His back became stooped with pain and his very life force dissipated before his eyes. He shook off the vision angrily. He would not, could not, allow his future to become set in stone; a stone that was tied around his ankles as he was thrown to the bottom of life’s dark murky waters. Jimmy was offering him an alternative, an escape. A way out of this servitude; he knew instinctively that this idea could work. He could see himself taking a book of stories derived from the mouths of the seriously disturbed. The sheer notoriety would be enough to launch the book on a wave of interest and disgust. He could picture himself defending his book on morning TV shows, sandwiched between soap opera gossip and fashion tips. He could see himself being lightly grilled by grinning orange skinned women caked in too much makeup. It really could work; it could be a way out and a way forward. He looked towards the patiently waiting Jimmy and steeled himself against the dark night ahead.
    “Alright,” he said firmly, “Who’s next?”

4.
    THE VOICE
     
    “Push him,” the voice whispered, “Do it now, quickly, quickly.”
    Duncan Murray turned around quickly to face the man behind him; a man who was not there. The voice had whispered in his ear but there was no-one standing behind him on the railway station platform. A woman some ten feet away was staring at him nervously as he had spun around with an angry expression to find that he was facing no-one. He shook his head and shrugged his shoulders; must be over-tired , he thought to himself.
    Duncan was thirty eight years old, heavy set and scruffy. He was a graphic designer who existed within the tight confines of a soulless cubicle day in day out. His shaved head poking over the top of his clipped together walls, the bullet tipped shape seemingly unseen by his peers. His wardrobe consisted of three different, but equally ill-fitting suits. His was a figure of lumps and curves that refused to conform to standard clothing shapes. He was a quiet man of little consequence; he’d often thought to himself that he would make a perfect bank